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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $7.5 million over five years to establish the Center for Probing the Nanoscale (CPN) at Stanford University.

The CPN is one of six new centers that the NSF is funding to support science and engineering at the scale of the nanometer -- one billionth of a meter, or roughly the size of atoms and molecules. Through nanoscale advances in manufacturing, biotechnology, electronics, medicine and more, nanotechnology may account for a $1 trillion annual market and employ two million people within 10 to 15 years, according to an NSF report.

"There's a huge effort in this country in nanoscale research, but we don't have the tools," said Kathryn Moler, associate professor of applied physics and of physics and a co-director of the center, in a written statement. "We want to engineer what's at the nanoscale. We need to be able to see it, and we need to be able to handle it in order to engineer it, and that's what our center's all about."

The CPN, which will have offices and a teaching lab in Stanford's Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, is a partnership between researchers at Stanford, IBM and other companies to develop novel nanoprobes and apply them to answering fundamental questions in science and technology, the university said.

"What's different about our [center] is that we're developing new tools to enable nanoscale science and technology, and we're excited to see what possibilities these tools will open up," said David Goldhaber-Gordon, assistant professor of physics and center co-director, in a written statement.

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